Tag Archives: hoffman estates

Drainage

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For many years we’ve had a serious drainage problem in our back yard …. every time it rained, we would get a big puddle in the back yard that would stick around for at least a week.  The picture to the left is the back yard 3 or 4 days after a heavy rain.

At one point, Ginny was thinking about having a rain garden put in the back corner, but I wasn’t a big fan of that idea.  We ended up dropping the idea because it would have taken a fair amount of maintenance.

In addition, our sump pump outlet was really close to the house and was not at all protected from freezing.  More than once the sump pump pipe would freeze in the winter, after we had a thaw, and the pump would get close to burning out because it couldn’t pump water.  Luckily I’ve always been home when this has happened … so I was able to remove the frozen section of PVC pipe and have it just dump out on to the lawn.

(If you haven’t noticed, we’ve had our fair share of water related house problems)

For years I kept saying I was going to get these two problems resolved.  Well, I finally got off my butt and had it taken care of.

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Ti Amo — Hoffman Estates

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We had dinner at the new Ti Amo restaurant, in Hoffman Estates, tonight.

It took the place of Babaluci, which we liked a lot. We were very disappointed when we saw they had closed.

Unfortunately, I was not especially impressed with the replacement.

I ordered Gnocchi with a side dish of Pasta Fagioul soup.

The soup was kind of bland, and looked like someone had used a stick blender to mix it up. There was almost no pasta in it.

The Gnocchi was mushy, with bland-tasting sauce. When I ordered the same dish at Babaluci, the Gnocchi had nice texture and the sauce was chunky, with nice pieces of tomato.

Ginny had a duck & pasta dish with a minestrone soup. Her soup also looked like it had been mixed with a stick blender. The duck was a bit gamier than she was expecting, and the noodles were too wide to be eaten easily.

The atmosphere, while OK, wasn’t anything to write home about. We liked the homey feel that Babaluci had. Of course, we were fairly regular and were always greeted warmly.

I noticed a distinct lack of seafood dishes on the menu..which is a big disappointment for me.

Price wise they seem to be a bit higher than I would expect, but not overly so. Ginny and I spent about $40 for dinner with tea to drink.

Ti Amo is probably worth another shot, but we’ll wait a few months for them to find their legs.